Hello friends! 🌸 Welcome to another modern classic review! Thank you for being here. I’ve been doing my best to include at least one classic literature piece in my monthly readings. In April, I read my first Columbian literature book, Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Marquez, one of the most famous writers in history. I do not like writing reviews for classics, mainly because it requires a lot of background research and knowledge about the socio-political and cultural situation of the era and the country it belongs. As an English Literature graduate, it stuck with me to analyze instead of writing a review talking about my thoughts. I will do my best about it and keep everything simple for my sake lol. I researched the themes and even though this book is on a thinner scale, the messages it gave were incredibly solid.
I enjoyed it, let time tell you that first. I enjoyed it but it did not blow me away nor it touched something inside. I emphasized the characters and the story but I focused on the psychology of the town instead of the characters individually. You may be wondering what I mean by that. I focused on the psychology of a group instead of one person. Even though we have significant characters that come in and go to the story, none of them actually participate in the things happening in the book. You know that our main character Santiago Nasar is going to die from the very first page. It is not something shocking or it doesn’t come out of nowhere. You know that this person is going to die and the narrator also mentions that everybody knows that this is going to happen.
It is said that the murder in the novel is actually a real thing from Marquez’s town. And though there are different views on the narrator, I felt like the person who was writing the story also narrated it. The story focuses on many characters, yet maybe the most intriguing of all is a very different and wealthy man coming to this little town (just like Mysteries by Hamsun) and his eccentric character manages to bewitch the town folk. His name is Bayardo San Roman, and he wishes to marry the daughter of a poor man Angel Vicario. A girl he has never met before. Though this town is fairly poor and nothing is different from any other town in a rural area, after they got married, Bayardo takes the young girl back to her father’s home and leaves. And it turns out that Angel Vicario is not a virgin. Considering that time, not being a virgin before marriage is not considered something incredibly wrong and it needs to be punished. This punishment includes the punishment of the woman and also the man by the elder people in the woman’s family. I’m not going to talk about how idiotic it was and I’m not going to talk about how many women had suffered from this but it is what it is in the book and her brothers decide to kill our main character.
This is where the psychology of a community came to my attention. Even though her brothers make it incredibly clear that they are going to kill this man who took the “virginity” of their sister, and even though they are well prepared for that, nobody in the town seems to do a thing. This is the most important theme I encountered in the book. Ignorance. Not only the ignorance but also the corrupted idea of honour in the book was completely odd to me. What I mean by “it was odd” is that in this little Colombian town, nobody actually raises their head to the murder of someone just because he may or may not do something not honourable. A lot of characters in the novel actually spit the image of this destructive idea of honour and their defence to this was justifying the murder of Santiago.
The people in the town actually felt like random observers that know what is going to happen yet were eager to watch just because they need to see the validity of it. And just this fact made me see them as not humans. Because one question kept coming to me as I kept reading the book; would you stand still if you knew that someone was going to die without any solid proof of an unhonourable action?
And another incredible thing was that in the writing itself, Marquez gave so many little details that put something so mundane and incredibly enlightened in a way that it is impossible for a regular person to see. It almost felt like he won the readers to see this idea of realism which is named as Magical Realism in his era by making the most normal things into something more magical and detailed. Overall, I will say this again, this is a very good book. It gave me a lot to think about and I enjoyed it. It is just that it didn’t really blow me in the way I hoped it would. 3.5⭐s to this beauty! I will surely read more from Marquez in the future!
I will see you in my next post friends! BYE! 🤟🏻
Luster of Books 